


keep on fighting and hold on, hold on

by necromantrix



Series: anthem for the already deceased [2]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, and a lil' after, because there's a lil' of that in here too, is "soft angst" a thing?, takes place during the eleventh hour, the title has nothing to do with anything really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-18
Updated: 2016-11-18
Packaged: 2018-08-31 17:55:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8588161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/necromantrix/pseuds/necromantrix
Summary: His teeth continue to chew on his bottom lip in silence for a few seconds before he finally looks up at her again. “Unless I, uh, goofed up the numbers for all three of them by a count of one, they’ve… it looks like they’ve died again. All of them, exactly once.”





	

                Julia doesn’t often get called out of her office by Kravitz; if he needs to talk to her, he’ll usually make the trip down the hall to her office himself. The fact that his voice comes over her stone of farspeech and says, “Hey, Julia, there’s, uh, there’s something you should probably see,” is immensely concerning and tips her off to the fact that something is awry. “Can you bring the forms from those three boys? I wanna make sure I’m not just… seeing things.” He refrains from using their names, knowing that direct mentions of Magnus hurt her more than subtle ones. “Those three” has become their nickname for the trio that he’s an integral part of.

               “Oh? Alright, give me a moment,” she replies, quickly finishing up signing off on the form on her desk before her. She files it and the rest of the finished stack away, and then rummages through a filing cabinet for the three Form D’s in question. Forms acquired, she locks her door and makes her way down the hall. She knocks three times on the door and opens it when he says “come in,” shutting the door behind herself.

               Kravitz is sitting at his desk, his book hovering open before him. His eyes are locked intently on it, although he manages to tear his gaze away to look at her and wave her over when he hears her step into the room. “Can I see those?” he asks, gesturing to the forms in her hand. Taking them as she offers them, he flips through them quickly and worries at his bottom lip.

               She waits expectantly for a moment, but when he doesn’t say anything she speaks up. “What’s going on?”

               His teeth continue to chew on his bottom lip in silence for a few seconds before he finally looks up at her again. “Unless I, uh, goofed up the numbers for all three of them by a count of one, they’ve… it looks like they’ve died again. All of them, exactly once.”

               “What?” Julia does _not_ like the sound of that at all, and she turns the levitating book with a gentle nudge so she can see it. The page is turned to Merle Highchurch’s entry, which states plainly that he’s died 58 times. She grips the corner of the forms Kravitz is holding so she can bend them backwards to see how many are written there. 57. “You’re serious. They’ve all died…”

               A wave of lightheadedness washes over her, and Kravitz stands abruptly to guide her into the seat behind her. She uses the feeling of the cushion against her back to ground herself, taking a deep breath she doesn’t need, just keep herself stabilized. While Kravitz has multiple forms he can switch between rather rapidly, Julia only has the one. If hers dissolves, it will take longer to reconstruct; it’s also a generally unpleasant experience that she’s been through once and doesn’t care to go through again.

               “Julia. _Julia_.” It takes her a moment to realize that he’s speaking to her from where he’s sitting on his desk now, and he only continues speaking when he can tell that she’s looking at and hearing him. “They’re not _dead_. Not in… not in any way that means they’ll be coming here, at least. I don’t know what’s—” His voice stops suddenly, his eyes narrowing as he looks at the book with an accusatory glare. “There’s no way…”

               “What? What is it?”

               “The count just… it just went up again. By one, but it went up.” _59._ He flips quickly to two more pages, his eyes darting to death counts. _21\. 10._ “They keep adding to their death count but they aren’t—there’s no actual _dying_. If they were dying, they wouldn’t be in this thing anymore. They’d be _here_ , in the Stockade.”

               “But they’re not.”

               “No, they’re not. I actually—” He furrows his brow in some confusion, looking at the page. He flips it to check the other side as though there’ll be more information there, and then he flips it back when there isn’t. “I actually don’t know where they are at all. There’s nothing here.”

               “What does that mean?” Julia stands up and sits on the desk beside him, leaning forward slightly to see the book around him.

               He shakes his head. “I don’t know. All the time I’ve been a bounty hunter, I’ve—I’ve never seen _anything_ like this.” As he speaks, the number goes up again, and both fall quiet for a long moment.

               She breaks the silence first, sliding off the desk to pace across the room once as she thinks. “How long do you think this’ll go on for?” Her voice betrays her concern and fear, although she’s remaining calm now. Her hold over her form is much more stable as she turns around to face him again, which is a relief to both.

               “I don’t have a _single_ clue,” Kravitz admits, his tone a blend of irritable and concerned. “When they get out of this—if they get out of this. Might not, actually. But _if_ they get out of this, I’ll need to talk to them.”

               “What about the Raven Queen?”

               He shrugs, visibly unconcerned about the thoughts of their employer—in this instance, at least. She knows he _does_ care greatly about what the Raven Queen thinks in the usual run of things, which probably comes with being the bounty hunter closest to her. “She trusts us to make decisions. There’s no bounty on any of those three, so I’m not even _deciding_ anything. I’m just—I just want to know… I’m curious about them. I didn’t give you details before, but when I met these three, they—they weren’t intimidated by me at all. Quite the opposite, actually. They knew I was coming for their souls and they didn’t care. At all. If anything, they found it _amusing_.”

               “You said they weren’t aware of their death count, right?” When she asks, her voice is softer than before; even without saying his name, speaking of the group Magnus is in in such a way that implies death hurts her.

               “They didn’t have a clue. They made jokes about it.”

               “I wou—”

               A voice coming over the stone of farspeech around her neck interrupts her. “Yo, Julia! You busy?”

               “Ah, no? What is it?”

               “I’m just, y’know, keepin’ an eye on things and whatnot, and there’s been a _huge_ influx of anomalies. You might wanna come look at this.”

               Julia and Kravitz exchange a look, and he raises a brow and tilts his head towards the door. “I’d go check on that. Let me know what it is, if it seems related; I’ll call you if anything changes here.” He glances at the book and sighs heavily when he sees that the death count’s gone up once more. Swinging his legs around to the other side of his desk, he stands up then turns and lets himself practically collapse into his chair.

               She glances at the book once more, some deep fear running through the center of her being, and then she tears her eyes away from it to leave the office.

               She isn’t gone long when things start getting distressingly strange for Kravitz, and he’s about to call her when things get distressingly strange for Julia elsewhere in the building and she decides to call him. “I’m coming back,” she says over the line as she gathers up some hastily written notes, not waiting for a response. “Something’s happening and I think it’s related to what you’re seeing.” Notes gathered, she breaks off at a jog down the hallway back towards his office.

               Kravitz is staring at the book from his chair with his arms crossed when she walks in, looking as though the book has been the cause of some personal slight or another. Perhaps it has. She closes the door behind herself as she walks in, dropping the papers on his desk. “What’s changed?”

               He pinches the bridge of his nose, taking a slow breath. “They have died… nine times now…” he says slowly, his voice carrying the tone of a man exasperated with his job. He _is_ utterly exasperated with his job in this moment. Slowly he lowers his hand and looks at her. “What did you find?”

               Julia sits on the desk, handing a page of hastily-written notes over to him. “There’s… quite a few people who are dying a _lot_ more than nine times. Looks like it started around the same time, too. The guys down at monitoring don’t know if it’s a fluke, or…”

               He takes the paper and looks it over, his eyes widening in shock at the numbers. “Is this… is this accurate? Where are they?”

               “There’s nothing about their location, but I told them to let me know if it shows up.”

               “So it’s possibly—no, it’s _probably_ connected.”

               She nods once. “That’s what I was thinking.”

               The death count ticks up once more. “Ten times,” he mutters, huffing. Information finally appears about where they’re located—forty minutes after this started, he notes—and he nods to himself as he reads it over. “And there they are… I think, uh, I think I’ll go wait for them. I don’t feel like approaching them in the open like that.”

               Julia looks at the words herself and frowns. “I haven’t heard of that place before,” she admits.

               “Neither have I.” He stands up, gesturing with one hand to shut the book and dematerialize it into some place between the planes. The dark skin and flesh of his right hand dissolves away into nothing but white bone as he summons up his scythe, but he doesn’t tear a rift into space before Julia speaks.

               “Has your job always been this way? I know you’ve been doing this for a while, right? I also know you said this kind of thing hasn’t before but… is this _entirely_ without precedent?” Her eyes are locked down on her hands as though staring at herself is enough to keep her form stable. Fear courses through her as she considers what exactly Magnus has got himself involved in. If there’s a precedent…

               “No. I’m sorry, Julia, but nothing… _nothing_ like this has ever happened before. Not as long as I’ve been a bounty hunter, anyway, and I’ve been doing this for—for a long, long time.” His grip on the scythe tightens slightly as he speaks, and then he raises the weapon and slashes down at empty space to tear open a rift. “I’ll keep you updated on what happens, alright? Let me know if anything changes here. Please.”

               Without waiting for a response—what else can be said?—he steps through the rift into the Bureau of Balance base.

\---

               The conversation goes about as well as one can expect—which is to say, not at all. It’s not _bad_ , but it’s certainly not smooth or easy. Taako is rather defensive about everything, not believing Kravitz when he says, _repeatedly_ , that he’s only here out of curiosity and not out of any obligation because of his job. Once that finally sets in things start going smoother; Taako explains the issue with Refuge and the loop and Kravitz listens intently, making mental note of everything Taako says about the situation as a whole while doing his best to remember any little details about Magnus to relay to Julia (probably against the rules, but… so are a lot of the things he’s been doing lately).

               It’s unfortunately cut short by Julia’s voice coming over his stone of farspeech with, “Kravitz, a Class B target just came up. You might want to get on that.” She’s right, of course; he hasn’t done nearly enough today, as concerned as he was about the ridiculous rising death count.

               He makes his apologies to Taako and lets him know, “I’d like to, uh, continue this conversation, if that’s alright. I feel there are still some loose ends.”

               “Oh, for sure. Uh… How do I get in touch? Or is that all on you?”

               After a moment of consideration—again, _fuck the rules or whatever_ —he attunes Taako’s stone of farspeech to his own before saying another goodbye, tearing another rift with his scythe, and stepping through.

\---

               It’s an easy target. Just some half-orc dabbling with things they shouldn’t—things no one should. But some people just have no respect for how life and death should progress, Kravitz thinks as he sends their soul off to the Astral Plane. He follows through the rift as he shifts into his more _alive_ -looking form, stopping by his office to fill out the forms he needs to with an ease that only comes from centuries of practice before taking the papers with him to Julia’s office.

               “How’d it go?” she asks as she takes the paper from him, glancing over it before setting it aside.

               He sits down and shrugs. “The job or the… _conversation_?”

               Julia shrugs. “Either? Both.”

               “The job was easy, but I think you knew it would be. As for the conversation…” Kravitz shrugs once, allowing himself a moment to think. “They ended up in a time loop. That’s—that’s what all the deaths were. The others who died even more, they were trapped in it for longer.”

               A frown tugs at the corners of her lips, and she crosses her arms over her chest as she leans back into her chair. “You mean, they _did_ die? And they remember dying all ten times?”

               The reason she’s asking isn’t a mystery to him, and he nods. “Yes, but they’re fine. All of them are fine. I didn’t talk to any of them except for Taako, but he told me… he told me they’re all alright. They all—they serve Istus now, and that’ll be good for, y’know, keeping them from being targets of the Raven Queen. She’s not going to go after Istus’ emissaries. They’re safe.”

               The corners of her lips twitch up into a hint of a smile now, and she nods. “I’m glad to hear that.” Her gaze drops to her left hand, to the simple but beautiful band still worn around her ring finger. The room is quiet for some time, but finally she pulls herself out of her thoughts and looks over at Kravitz. “What can you tell me about his friends? Or the one friend, at least. I want to know. I want to know who he’s involved in this with.”

               “I hope you’re prepared for disappointment, because they’re all idiots,” he says almost instantly, although the words are without malice. “But I think… I think they do care about each other, and they _do_ care about saving the world. That’s what they’re… That’s their goal, Julia. They’re trying to save the world. From what, I don’t—I don’t think anyone knows, really. They all—”

               “Yo, Kravitz, my man, this thing working?”

               They’re both silent for a moment as the voice suddenly comes over his stone of farspeech, and slowly Julia’s expression begins to shift in something akin to a sly smile with a raised brow.

               “Don’t say a word about this,” he warns, picking up the stone.

               “I’m not, I’m not,” she says with a little smile as he stands up, dismissing himself with an, “I’m sorry, I have to take this,” and then leaving.

               She watches him go, catching the beginnings of, “Yeah, Taako, I can hear you,” before he closes the door behind himself. The smile fades as she looks at her ring again, some part of her wishing she had the same freedom to pass back and forth between the planes.

               _No_ , _you don’t want that_ , she reminds herself sternly, _because that would mean everyone you ever knew is dead_. Instead, she knows she has to content herself being a passive force in this situation. It hurts. It’s so different than the active role she had in life: a revolutionary alongside Magnus, fighting with him against the corrupt. She was a victor who got a taste of the happy life she wanted and then she died suddenly, an inglorious death in a collapsed building, unable to fight back.

               Once more she’s unable to fight back, having to content herself to being confined to the astral plane. This time, though… _This time I can at least be aware._

**Author's Note:**

> The only reason I didn't have their loop deathcount hit suddenly is because that would have made this story a lot more boring. Instead, they got distributed throughout the final "real" loop, the one that made Avi say they were only in there for 40 minutes. Fun fact. That's what happened there.
> 
> Another note is that I still love Kravitz and Julia so much.
> 
> The third and final note is that the title is from _Your Heart Is A Muscle The Size Of Your Fist_ by Ramshackle Glory.


End file.
